39th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC 2017)

Date Published

07/2017

Publisher

IEEE

Conference Location

Jeju Island, Republic of Korea

Abstract

Zika virus has caught the worlds attention, and has led people to share their opinions and concerns on social media like Twitter. Using text-based features, extracted with the help of Parts of Speech (POS) taggers and N-gram, a classifier was built to detect Zika related tweets from Twitter. With a simple logistic classifier, the system was successful in detecting Zika related tweets from Twitter with a 92% accuracy. Moreover, key features were identified that provide deeper insights on the content of tweets relevant to Zika. This system can be leveraged by domain experts to perform sentiment analysis, and understand the temporal and spatial spread of Zika.